Armenian News Network /
Groong
An Armenian Orphan of the
Genocide Gives Fuller Meaning to the Essence of a Painting on Processing
Incinerated Christian Bodies Used by an Assyrian-Chaldean Catholic Priest in a
Book Entitled “Shall This Nation Die?”
Armenian News Network /
Groong
August 25, 2014
Special to Groong by Abraham D. Krikorian
and Eugene L. Taylor
Long Island, NY
A category
of imagery associated with various persecutions of the Armenians, particularly in
the waning years of the Ottoman Empire and culminating with the Armenian
Genocide, is what may be described as pictorial
- inspired by actual situations or events.
This species of imagery takes on special significance when it reflects
witnessing. Some have also referred to
this as a form of “survivor art or survivor-inspired art”.
Reverend
Joseph Naayem was a priest of the Syro-Chaldean rite at Urfa. He personally experienced and survived the
atrocities, and was a survivor who was approved by his own Patriarch and the
Holy See in Rome to make appeals on behalf of his people, the Chaldeans. See “A Present-day Nation of Catholic
Martyrs” on pages 42-43 of Catholic Missions (New York) volume 15 no. 2,
February at http://books.google.com/books/about/Catholic_Missions.html?id=gp_mAAAAMAAJ
Rev. Naayem arrived
in New York on September 9, 1920 from Liverpool at the young age of 32 and, using
Yonkers, New York area as a base of operations, immediately
took up activity raising funds in the New York City region and upstate cities
such as Buffalo and Syracuse etc. His
intent was to visit virtually all the parishes in the Catholic Diocese.
A caption of
an article about his purpose and work published in the Brooklyn Daily Star of
April 27, 1921 pg. 3 reads “Paints Picture of Horrors of War in Chaldea.”
Rev. Naayem,
as part of his making appeals, routinely described how some 250,00 Assyrian
Christians from Mesopotamia, Kurdistan and Western Persia were tortured and put
to death by Turks and Kurds, including five Catholic Archbishops and hundreds
of priests. The remnants of these
ancient people were in dire straits and needed help for their very existence.
The original
version of a book in French in 1920 that he published is entitled “Les
Assyro-Chaldéens et les Arméniens massacrés par les
Turcs: documents inédits recueillis par un temoin oculaire” [The Assyro-Chaldeans and Armenians Massacred
by the Turks: unpublished documents collected by an eye-witness]
This may be
read online at http://www.imprescriptible.fr/documents/naayem/d07.htm.
Rev. Naayem
was, incidentally, the Chaplain General to the Allied Prisoners of War in
Turkey at Afion Kara-Hissar, incurring the displeasure of the Turkish
Commandant and as a consequence thrown into prison for some 130 days (see “A
Present-day Nation of Catholic Martyrs” on page 43 of Catholic Missions (New
York) volume 15 no. 2, February at http://books.google.com/books/about/Catholic_Missions.html?id=gp_mAAAAMAAJ
The English
language version of his book, appeared the following year, but topics and eye-witness accounts are presented in a somewhat different arrangement. Moreover, it is accompanied not only with some
of the same photographs as the French production but also some different ones. The English version may be accessed at
https://archive.org/details/shallthisnationd00naay
or with
re-typed text at
http://www.aina.org/books/stnd.htm
A REMARKABLE PAINTING
One of the
images that is of special interest to us here is one entitled
“(From a
Painting)”
“The burning
of the bodies of Christian women by Kurdish women, to recover the gold and
precious stones they were supposed to have swallowed.” [Facing page 172.]
Below we
present a scan from the book and a further enlargement. (Attempts made so far have failed to turn up
the painting. It bears on the lower left
the more or less readily discernible “de Jaegher. The first initial is
illegible.
What is
immediately apparent from the painting is that it reflects a composite scenario
of several activities and thus covers a range of sins. We leave it to the viewer to try to figure
out the various stages of infamy in progress.
Center coin,
with a dime and nickel on either side, is a gold from the period of Sultan
Abdul Hamid II. The 100 khurush [now
spelled kuruş] is about 22 millimeters diameter,
and weighed 7.261 grams. 100 khurush equaled one Turkish pound or Lira. Not all that easy to swallow.
The text in
Rev. Naayem’s book that pertains to this image reads as follows:-
“For several
days the soldiers were busy plundering their victims of whatever they had
left. Without clothes, suffering from
cold and hunger, two thousand died from sickness and exposure. Several hundred, rendered mad by thirst,
threw themselves into the empty reservoirs, common in this desert country, and
there died, while large numbers of others were killed by the Kurds and thrown
in on top of them. Thirteen reservoirs
were filled in this manner. Several thousand Christians who remained were surrounded one day by
five hundred armed Kurd horsemen and one hundred and fifty police. Having gathered the unhappy wretches together
in a place edged with the long dry grass which grows
so abundantly in the semi-arid region, the persecutors set fire to it. Before doing this they plundered their
victims of all they had.
“The unhappy
people, terror-stricken at seeing the flames approaching them, realized that
their end had come. Those
who made their way through the flames were met by an equally deadly rifle fire. Thus were exterminated some thousands of
human beings, all indeed that remained of the above-mentioned convoys.
“After this
awful holocaust [emphasis ours],
Kurd women and children arrived with sieves and sifted the ashes of the dead to
see if they could find gold, since it was a regular practice of the Christian
women to swallow pieces of money for future use.” Pgs. 171-173.
Readers will
agree that this description provides us with a chilling and grisly scene.
Nahabed Chakrian (1904-1993) born in
Zara village, Sepastia on
Massacre and Burning of Bodies in Search
of Valuables
As grisly as
the above from Rev. Naayem is, it does not provide us with particularly great
detail or very much personal connection.
For this, we
should like to present here a more personalized and substantial story of the
same general sort of scenario as told to young Nahabed Chakrian by his much
older sister Gulizar. This description
was taken from his memoir that one of us (A.D.K.) translated to English back in
2005 from audio tapes that Baron Nahabed had recorded
in 1988 (see “Memoir of Genocide – 1915 to 1920, The Story of an Armenian
Boy” by Nahabed Chakrian (1904-1993) translated by Abraham D. Krikorian, edited
by Florence Chakerian and A.D.K.).
A copy of
the translated and edited document and tapes put on disks was deposited at the
University of California Los Angeles, Armenian Genocide survivor collection oral
history archives (personal communication Florence Chakerian).
The
following is taken from Baron Nahabed’s “Memoir”, pgs. 65-69
[Burning Bodies]
“Now that I
was together with my sister, I wanted to understand what took place when we
were apart when the Chechens had ‘adopted’ me and sent me to their village,
during the time I had been ‘saved’. She
began her account by saying that almost a couple of weeks later,
some 50,000 exiles came to Shaddadiyeh.
Four days later, from amongst this population, before sunrise, six or
seven Chechens went to where the exiles were, to say that upon new orders,
males would be separated and taken with them to build new road for railroad
tracks. But this time, that dirty trick
did not work. And none of the exiles
moved from their spots. The Chechens got
infuriated and taking out their pistols started to fire shots into the air with
curses. But this time [as well] there
was a different quality to the operation [viz. there was some opposition]. Among those exiles there were some
Zeituntsis, of whom three or four, had been able to keep hidden in their
pockets, always at hand, some old guns.
And when the Chechens began to attack and shoot, it seems that those
Zeituntsis had an agreement as to their fate--saying that “If we are going to
die, let us die with our families”. They
fired and killed [uses the word satkel
here] three beasts [yerek gazaner,
i.e. Chechens]. The other four ran away,
and went back, joining up with the other 147.
Nearly a hundred Chechens on horses had gone out in the desert and were
all over the place. It was already
getting dark my sister said, beginning to cry, and two or three hours later
they left. It was not apparent what they
had gone for, or where they had gone.
When dawn came, it became apparent what was happening. The entire exile population in the desert was
interspersed with thousands of Arabs, armed with guns and sabers [zenkerov yev turerov]. And just as I have described before, some ten
to fifteen feet distant from a Chechen tent there was the dry river bed [called
a wadi in Arabic]
which joined the river in the middle [here Nahabed uses the Turkish word
ortahnan]. On the right side of the river, there was the
village, where on the outskirts the Arabs armed with swords and guns were
scattered. The exiles had nowhere else
to go. Arabs in the rear, Arabs on the
right side, Arabs on the left side; and if they went forward, only the middle
of the river and a narrow opposite side, to the right of which were some three
hundred Chechens.
“The Arabs opened fire on the encampment of exiles on three sides with an
attack…“ said my sister, much saddened.
“The Armenians had nowhere else to go”, she continued, crying.
“Either to go forward and end up in the middle of the river, or where
there were three hundred Chechens, or to the ten to fifteen feet deep dry wadi, or to the other side of the dry tsor [wadi] where the three hundred
armed Chechens and close to one hundred fifty Arabs were waiting, armed, for
the slaughter. Behind
them the sword and the bullet, in front of them the same. One side, the river if they could reach it,
before them the dry wadi where there
were four hundred armed Chechens and Arabs waiting.
“The screams had broken loose. Behind them the sword and the bullet; in front of them, the same. On one side the river, if they could reach
there, in front of them the dry tsor[wadi] where
there 400 armed Chechens and Arabs waiting.
The suffering screams and firing had started. The exiles had no alternative but to go back
or forward or left. From three sides the
Arabs were approaching with swords and daggers [surov yev tashouynerov], and killed with bullets whom
ever they encountered. In front of them
four hundred fifty people were approaching.
Indiscriminately and ruthlessly they fired upon them. An hour later the sun was obscured from the
gunpowder smoke. “But the suffering
screams and massacre had not finished”, said my sister again bitterly. The gun powder smoke
was such that one could not see anything but only hear the screams of the
victims filling the air. “For nearly
three hours this went on, and finally stopped”, said my sister. It took about an hour for the sky to be
cleared of the smoke, and for things to begin to be distinguished [viz. as to
what had happened].
“The first thing that struck my eyes was that the dry tsor [wadi] before us, as far as they
eye could see, was full of endless dead.
As far as one could see the desert was covered with dead. From that fifty
thousand exiles, only six hundred and fifty people were left on their
feet. All of them wounded to one degree
or other.
“When the gun smoke finally cleared, and the air brightened, then a crier
with a loud voice began to shout and announce if anyone at fault was still
alive, he would be forgiven. And, that
to those who could walk, and could endure to that populated village place,
bread would be given. [Given what had
happened that the few wounded survivors would be “forgiven” and given bread is
incredible!]
“Hearing that news, those people who had fallen and were lying half-dead
under dead bodies, as a matter of fate, pushed them aside and rose up on their
feet, yielding an additional one hundred and fifty people. It became the task of the Arabs and anyone
among the agonized Armenians who could pick up a body along with someone else,
to collect bodies and pile them on one another.
The corpses were stripped of their clothing and were examined before the
eyes of a Chechen. If any money was found on their person, then the Cherkesses would take
the money. Any
wearable clothes would be taken by the Arabs. The bodies were heaped upon
each other by the thousands. This
job took a lot of time, and when it was finally finished, fuel was spilled on
the heaps [varelaniut tapetzin,
suggesting by use of the tapel
something liquid like kerosene] and set fire to them. The air was full with the smell. And when it was all thoroughly incinerated,
upon orders of Suleiman Bey, screens [magher]
were brought, and those ashes were all passed through the screens, with the
intent of recovering swallowed gold pieces.
“This chore took a day and a half, and after that, the executioners’ work
[tahij inelou qordzuh] of the
Chechens was completed.”
We end by
asking “What more can we say?” We shall
let matters rest here for the time being.
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